Ratings and Reviews by Sam Kabo Ashwell

The fundamental subject-matter of literature is difficult loves: problems that matter deeply but are insoluble. By this standard, Bee is the most literary CYOA that I've encountered. A coming-of-age story about impossible parents, limited means and awkward emergence from isolation, it put me a little in mind of I Capture the Castle (which Emily tells me she hasn't read).

Rather than being structured around a strict linear tree like the bulk of stateless CYOA, Varytale encourages modular design more akin to RPG gamebooks or Echo Bazaar style browser-adventure-RPG games. Bee is structured around the passage of the year, with different events becoming available at different seasons; age, the state of your stats, and previous events also determine which options are available. A number of sections can be repeated with variations, but (more so than its antecedent Echo Bazaar) these are things whose repetition makes sense as narrative and as reality: chores, seasonal religious festivals. The fragmentary nature of Varytale stories is very well-suited to the retrospective style, with its assembled incidents of memory.

It should scarcely need repeating by this point, but Emily writes consistently sharp, telling prose. The story would not work without it.

One of the game's strongest points is how successfully it evokes the particular intensity of the aesthetic sense emerging in adolescence, the discovery of a transformative power, burning in isolation, standing out sharply against the world of drab concerns and tired formulas. The most prominent parts of this involve the protagonist mapping out for her own feelings about Christian ritual and the English language, but also in the seasons, in the contemplation of an emotion, in the elusive moments of family happiness. It's a story about learning to appreciate things deeply, and how to negotiate for a better deal, and reconciling the two. It's about the realisation that you're smarter than your parents. Like much of Emily's work, it's about the pathos of limitations, about lofty ambitions that will inevitably be diminished -- you're told from the outset that you will not win Nationals. (Despite the competitive framing, and in line with the Varytale ethos, this is only slightly game-like; character stats are tracked loosely, and while not every node can be found in a single playthrough, there is not really any challenge per se.)

It's also about an interweaving of shame and bristly pride; at its most documentary, Bee becomes something of an account of the culture and experience of homeschooled children. It's neither an attack nor an apology, though it has definite elements of both; it paints a more nuanced picture of homeschooling than is usual from either its advocates or mainstream critics. One obvious effect is that the protagonist has no friends in the normal sense: the listing of known characters makes a distinction between family (too basic to list) and Acquaintances, an uncomfortable and lukewarm category that's confirmed by the text. (Of course, much of this is because the protagonist's intellectual development is far in advance of everything else; it's easy to think of her as being considerably older than she is. For a while I had the vague sense that the story dealt so slightly with sex and romance because she was from a repressed religious family; but once I actually articulated the thought, I realised it didn't hold up.)

(As a technical note, I first played this when play was restricted by Story Points, Varytale's equivalent of the Echo Bazaar candle. Bee is, at present, no longer thus restricted. Generally speaking I loathe the candle system; it's horribly anti-player. But I'll admit that its artificial choke on pacing does affect how one reads, and offset the distinctly CYOA-ish temptation to hurry through the text and to get to options.)

Zork N+9 is an Oulipan version of Zork, in which all the nouns of the text have been shifted by nine dictionary places. The result is a pile of beautiful, diverting nonsense.

The first effect of the transposition is that sometimes the modified sentences just happen to have funny parts: "On the tack is an enlongated brown safe, smelling of hot percussionists." Tack, elongated safe, blah blah; but the smell of hot percussionists, that's good stuff. I'm easily entertained by generated text humour and by a fortuitous juicy phrase, so there's plenty of immediate enjoyment to be had here.

Secondly, there's a feeling of formlessness and ambiguity, similar to that of playing The Gostak. Unlike The Gostak, however, you know that the nouns correspond to a more familiar environment, and you probably have a pretty good idea about what that environment is: even if you've never played the original, it's not hard to guess plausible words that are alphabetically close. This constrained the surrealism somewhat; I never pictured a bisexual sorceress chirping in the distributor, even though I appreciated the phrase, because it was clear that it was really a bird. What it has that The Gostak lacks is a sense of a familiar landscape transformed. How this affects you will depend on whether you know Zork intimately, slightly or not at all. I've played a little of the original, a while ago; it's not an important text for me personally, and my memory tends to get it mixed up with Adventure, but I'm aware of how large it looms in the IF consciousness. So on top of my vague recollections about how the game works, the effect of the switched nouns is very dreamlike. I sometimes dream about books that are familiar and important but, on waking, turn out not to exist; this has something of that sense of familiarity-across-a-gulf. For someone who was closely familiar with Zork, able to reliably translate every modified noun, this experience would probably be very different.

The modification is less than complete; many nouns, some of them quite common ('door', 'room', 'score') have been left intact. Some of this may have been intended as a consideration to the player, but if so, it seems like a misjudgment. The Gostak demonstrates that it's possible to navigate an IF world with no familiar points of reference at all; most of the people likely to play this will be able to rely on at least passing familiarity with Zork; and the effect of 'real' nouns is actually pretty jarring. And these would be among the easiest words to figure out. (Sometimes verbs are transposed, too; this seems to happen with words that can also be nouns.)

Nonetheless, this is obvious but bears mention: Zork is already a difficult game and the nonsense makes it more so. The game was not designed with the translation problem in mind. Playing this cold would be considerably more difficult than The Gostak. And here's the real kicker: a standard Zork walkthrough would also, in effect, be a translation. It seems to me that reading this side-by-side with the original text, or a walkthrough's boiled-down version of it, would reduce the whole thing to a cheap party trick, magic that's boring because you can see how it's done.

If it's too troublesome to play, though, the source is still pretty entertaining.

Nemesis Macana is one of those games, like 9:05, that takes less time to play than it does to describe, and which is better-described by playing it. So, the rest of this is going in spoiler-space, and you can come back once you've played it. Oh, right, and it's a Stiffy Makane game, so there will be penises. Consider this your penis warning.

(Spoiler - click to show)Formally speaking, it's not much of a game, and probably better thought of as a character portrait. The great majority of its text comes in the form of the Manifesto, a rambling and uninteractive document in which the fictional author (a sort of sexual Raskolnikov) lays out his tormented position on art, sex, and Stiffy Makane's rightful position at the pinnacle of IF, interlarded with philosophical references and worrying tangents about his girlfriend. The game proper is very short, linear and lightly implemented (albeit with a few gems of parser response here and there), but thick with entertainingly overwrought prose; its basic form roughly mirrors the original Erotic Adventures of Stiffy Makane.

Since The Undiscovered Country, Stiffy Makane has been a character whose purpose is to wade through a morass of references, to which he is blithely indifferent due to his monomaniacal (but totally unconflicted) focus on sex. The narrator of Nemesis, on the other hand, is heavily invested in Art and has a deep, conflicted loathing of sex. His name is a portmanteau of Shakespeare and Melville (the pale-assed Stiffy plays Moby Dick to Herman's lunatic Ahab); his sexual attitudes are a munge of Victorian propriety, wretched Freud (literal castration? Really?) and overblown, inconsistent towers of theory built upon these.

To a large extent, the game is a parable about the fundamentally neurotic nature of totalising theories, particularly of aesthetics or sex. It's also , like The Undiscovered Country, a critique of the basic crapness of AIF as pornography, the attitude Stephen Bond described as "an inner belief that eroticism, including auto-eroticism, is dirty and shameful; and this no doubt also accounts for the puerile and fucked-up attitude of so much of their Wankstoffe". (You might also read it as arguing that it's senseless to try and make porn into something artistically valid; Schudspeer's porn stylings are ludicrously unarousing precisely because he's trying to make them worthy of the Bard. Bonus points for the use of the word 'vulva', by the way; there are worse terms for it, I ween, but none quite so horribly suitable.)

Much of my reaction was, oh man, are we even still talking about this? This isn't the 70s, so why do we get a fictional world that works according to Freud's stupid logic? Didn't that go out along with rectal thermometers turning you gay? (When first announced, it was widely assumed that the self-aggrandising Schudspeer was the sockpuppet of a troll; the portrait is too conspicuously hyperbolic to be plausible as sincere.) Then I recalled that we live in an age in which the political apparatus of the most advanced nation on Earth can be distracted for weeks debating whether contraception transforms women into slatterns of Beelzebub. So, okay, the past isn't dead, it's just really creepy. Creepier than Stiffy Makane.

The ending is interesting mostly because the choice you're offered is meaningless, a flip of the coin; either way, you're still the same fucked-up person and nothing has really changed. There's a direct reference to the art-or-love choice in Blue Lacuna, which the game implicitly rejects: in the loveless world of Schudspeer there can be no good art, no good sex, precisely because he's so committed to the idea of their necessary antagonism.

So: if ridiculously over-lyrical prose and fucked-up POVs amuse you, this is a fine way to spend the few minutes it'll take to reach its climax. Shakespeare it ain't, but an engaging creation nonetheless. function showSpoiler(id) { document.getElementById("a_spoiler" + id).style.display = "none";document.getElementById("s_spoiler" + id).style.display = "inline";}; document.currentScript.parentElement.querySelectorAll('.spoilerButton a').forEach(function (link) { link.addEventListener('click', function (event) { event.preventDefault(); showSpoiler(event.target.dataset.num); });});//-->